Publishers of certain web sites provide a range of on-line content including links to news, reference material, shopping and search tools. Often, these web sites are referred to as “portals” intended to be a home page on an Internet browser. The wise range of on-line content is intended to increase usage by appealing to a large number of Internet users. Increased usage enhances the value of advertising presented on the web site.
To enhance usage further, some publishers of web sites personalize the on-line content for each user. The personalized web page has a number of types of on-line content that may be selected for display by each user. These preferences by the user are typically entered through preference screens that prompt the user to make selections at predefined radio button inputs and pull down lists.
The express selection of user preferences is conventionally maintained in one of three ways. First, preferences input to a web page may be stored to the local hard drive of the user's computer as a cookie accessed by the remotely accessed publisher's web site. Second, the preferences may be maintained by the remote web site and the identity of the user requested through a login screen upon subsequent visits to the web site. Third, a locally stored version of a web site browser may store the user's preferences and specifically request desired on-line content from the remote web site (i.e., “pull technology”).
While the ability of a user to expressly personalize a web page is useful, often the user finds providing the information to be inconvenient. Even if the user chooses to provide the express preferences, often the user fails to update the preferences as his subjective preferences change.
In addition, often the user accesses the remote web site from different local computers. Consequently, those personalized web sites that rely upon locally stored information (e.g., cookies) fail to recognize the user's preferences, forcing the user to personalize the web site from each local computer.
One approach to automatically adjusting the on-line content for a web site has been to monitor the selections made by the user in accessing on-line content. In particular, a publisher encourages users to navigate to various on-line content through their web site and to track the navigation choices made. Often, users do not prefer to select on-line content through a web site, such as by using frames. Consequently, many times such tracking is performed by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who track all navigation selections (“click stream”) by the user.
Monitoring click streams in order to automatically adjust on-line content does not adequately anticipate the subjective preferences of each user. The circumstances that prompt a user to navigate to certain types of on-line content may abruptly change based on the context of use. In addition, the user may not even be consciously aware of a type of on-line content, and thus not navigate to those types of web sites. Consequently, the tracking of the click stream cannot anticipate this subjective preference.
Therefore, a significant need exists for an improved way to display on-line content personalized for a user.